freeman

Amazingly clean and precise work, kudos!

Pine cones are also brilliant for kindling. Found that out after someone on here mentioned using them and I figured what they hey, and gave it a shot. Doesn't hurt that I've got several massive pine trees in front of the shop.

How about taking a slice and making matching belt buckle, cufflinks and a tie clip?

Thanks again for the suggestion Grant! I dug up a set of tong blanks I'd been fiddling with at a demo a couple weeks ago and finished them up as a small pair of half v bolt head tongs. They aren't as clean as I'd like but they work like a charm and welding the reins on made the work go a lot faster than the last set I made.

Greatly appreciated. I'd been idly mulling over what jaw shape to go for on the smaller stuff. I don't currently have the tooling I'd need to make the tooling I'd need to make a true pair of wolf's jaw tongs, so I'll give your hybrid v design a shot.

Absolutely stunning work, and I second it being really nice to see pattern welded stock used for something that isn't sharp and pointy.

Small as in 1/4" or smaller square or round stock, the fiddly little stuff I make hooks and bottle openers out of while I'm waiting for larger stock to soak. The pair of tongs I made are sized for the larger stock I've been using and don't get a good bite on anything smaller than 3/8" or so.

I know what you're saying. Most of the prior occasions I've tried to force myself to make tongs I'd get one blank made and then decide I'd rather make a bunch of something else than spend the time required to finish the pair. Then again that was when I had the luxury of a decent pair of all-around tongs. I'm digging the bolt head tongs but it's looking like they don't handle smaller stock well at all so it looks like I'll be making another set here in the next couple days. Give me a holler when you're headed to the fair, I may just pop in and say hey.

Maybe I forgot them at the demo I helped with last weekend, or they could be hiding somewhere in the garage, whatever, I haven't been able to locate my good general purpose tongs for days now. I finally got sick of trying to make due with the miserable pair of twist tongs I made back when I'd been smithing for two weeks and decided to whip up a small pair of bolt head tongs I've been wanting. After rummaging around in the scrap pile for a while I managed to come up with a length of 3/4" round mild steel. A liter and a half of water and three hours later I've a working pair of tongs. Out of sheer perversity I decided to draw the reigns out just to see what kind of suffering is involved. Having done it, I can say with some confidence I don't ever intend to repeat the exercise. If I didn't already know how to forge weld I'd drop everything and go learn it if that meant I never had to draw out another set of reigns. Things I learned along the way: Starting big changes in shape with the heaviest available hammer speeds things up tremendously. If you're tired it's better to take another heat and rest, even if the metal's still at working temps. It takes longer to remove errant hammer marks from loss of control over a heavy hammer than it does to take a breather. Switching to a light hammer for finishing greatly improves control and thus results. A set of friction calipers greatly helps in getting everything the same size. I'll be making a pair next time I'm in the shop. Drawing out reigns by hand is a pointless exercise in human suffering. Weld em. I really wish I had a swage block. On that note, I'm going to go ice my arm. Cheers!

That is a quality looking instrument! Anyone would be proud to own it but I'm sure it has special value for your father since you forged it for him. Can you tell us about your experience welding it? How many welding heats did it take? Any special prep?

Huzzah!

Fantastic work! Well conceived and well executed! One question, what size slitter did you use to start your holes? Edit: And what size rivets? Guess that's two questions.

Awesome, let us know how it turns out!

A couple months ago a friend stopped by on his way to the scrap yard and dropped off 12 feet of high carbon braided steel cable. He told me I was welcome to it if I welded it up and made him something out of "damascus". I thanked him, tossed the cable into my small (but growing) treasure trove (aka pile of rusting scrap) and promptly forgot about it. This evening I was out at the forge having trouble focusing on a large project I've got in the works so I decided to toss a chunk of the cable in the fire to see if I could weld it up. I stacked my fire like I normally do for a forge weld, brought the piece up to a medium red, doused it in borax, then slowly brought it up to welding temps, turning the stock every 5-10 seconds or so. First few hits where like beating a wonton with a rubber mallet, stuff spraying all over the place and the cable flopping around like crazy. Somewhere around the fifth or sixth hit it just all came together and it was like I was striking a solid billet. Repeated this process six or seven times to produce a 1' x 5/8 square bar. Once that was done I forged the bar into a crude knife shape then did a grind on the blade with my bench grinder and a file before polishing it up. The finished project is about the most embarrassing excuse for a knife I've seen to date, but I figured what they hey and tossed it into a bath of 10 parts vinegar and 2 parts diet mountain dew (couldn't hurt, right?) with some table salt thrown in for grins. If it etches ok I might post some pics for folks to laugh at. Mostly I just wanted to share my findings so far from this evening's experiment. Those being: Forge welding braided steel cable is easier than doing a dropped tongs weld. Everything's more or less in place and if you ignore the initial trainwreck when you first start hitting it it'll settle down and weld quickly. Gloves are a must for welding this stuff. It's impossible to overstate how much stuff sprays all over the place when you first start welding it. Muriatic acid is questionable as an etchant. The fumes are obnoxious and it cuts so fast it seems like detail is lost. Neutralizing a 2/3 of a pint glass of muriatic acid with a box of baking soda on one of your work benches is *really* stupid. It makes even more obnoxious fumes and a huge mess. I am a poor bladesmith. So who else has welded up cable damascus and does anyone know of uses for it that don't involve cutlery?

My grandfather's house is in the same area, no chimney but his foundation's cracked pretty badly too. Here's hoping insurance covers some of the damage.

1) Trial and error with (hopefully) the tutiliage of an "ole timer". John C. Campbell ain't going anywhere. 2) Who's in the SCA? Persona and kingdom etc... I hope you have more fun than I did with this. It was a blast 15 years ago but times change. Fair warning: unless you're interested in crippling yourself for life, avoid (like the plague) heavy fighting. You'll hear a lot of gas about how it's perfectly safe yadda yadda, you can't find a Knight that hasn't destroyed his knees, back, shoulders, elbows or some combination of the lot. Good luck in any case. 3) Anyone in the central NC area (I'm in fayetteville) wanna help a newb get started? I'm in the Triangle and I'm happy to help although there are smiths in Wendell and Fuquay Varina that are much closer to you than I am. Check out NCABANA. 4) Resources on the web I can use to get my knowledge up prior to comming home. Gotta be graphic lite as our internet here is really slow, so no youtube unfortunitly. Shame you can't do youtube videos since nothing beats being able to watch someone work. In any case there are a ton of e-books linked on here and on google's free book search.

Fantastic deal! Congratulations!

Fantastic work!

Don't think your early adoption is a hallmark of what the rest of the industry is doing. Browser support for the major features in 5 is still lagging, especially in the corporate arena. For projects that require legacy browser support implementing HTML5 requires a huge raft of javascript hacks and other browser-specific failover nonsense. Most paying clients aren't going to foot the tab for that kind of redundancy, especially for a handful of canvas bling that can just as easily be implemented in actionscript with full cross-browser support and better performance. I think you need to ratchet your technical zealotry back a notch there, bub. HTML5 is great if you're working for a startup, doing a dinky little one-off project that doesn't need legacy support or you're working with a bottomless budget. There are solid business and technical reasons for not implementing a project in HTML5, most of which involve performance and legacy browser support. For you to imply I don't know my craft because I don't agree with your worldview is not only profoundly offensive, it's misguided. I've suggested that non-technical individuals need not bother wading into the middle of what is essentially an early-adoption phase of a draft spec that isn't even fully implemented in the latest generation browsers. Ask me again when IE 6/7 aren't a going concern and I'll probably answer differently. My credentials: I'm a contributing developer to the Drupal CMS project (http://drupal.org/), co-maintainer of 7 contributed modules, I've got patch code in 10 others and I've got code in version 7 of core. My code is peer reviewed and running on 9,000+ websites. I've consulted on projects for fortune 100 companies, Amnesty International, the ACLU and the United Nations (to name a few).

Hard to tell from just one pic but that anvil looks like it's in good shape to me.

I just had a friend stop by the house this evening and drop off two large coil springs. Needless to say I was pretty excited when I saw this thread. I can't wait to get back out to the shop and forge up some tooling. Thanks for sharing this knowledge!

And that, my friend, is why I stopped accepting freelance work from small businesses, family members or "friends of a friend" five years ago. I'd rather tar a roof in July than go back to dealing with that kind of hideous nonsense.

HTML5 is only relevant if you work for a startup company in silicon valley and one of the founders has a fetish for cutting edge user experience design. In all other settings it's a buzzword.

When it comes to getting a clean website design, there's really no comparison between hiring a professional designer and trying to do it yourself with software. It takes some serious design chops and years of study to master designing web pages. Heck, building websites is so complicated larger projects require three largely unrelated skill sets: back end development, front end development and design, any one of which is enough to found a career on.

Here in the Triangle area of NC blacksmithing equipment is pretty hard to come by. I've been watching the local deal papers, fleamarket and craigslist like a hawk for months, nothing. Strangely enough if you head 2 hours west of here there's typically some form of blacksmithing equipment listed on craigslist every other week.